In the third case, 29-year-old ‘Michelle’ was last seen leaving the Lake George Hotel at Bungendore on the evening of 6 September 1991 with the aim of hitchhiking home to Queanbeyan. She was not seen alive again. Ten weeks later, two forestry workers found her body in the Tallaganda State Forest near Bungendore, 120 kilometres south of Belanglo. Michelle had been stabbed once in the back. Her underpants and jeans were around her ankles and she had been sexually assaulted. When found, she was lying face-down next to a fallen tree trunk and had been covered with pine tree branches. A number of personal items, including jewellery, were found to be missing, but their value did not suggest the motive for taking them was profit. As with the first case, the location of the attack, its timing and circumstances, the ‘burial’ of the victim and the apparent taking of ‘mementos’ all suggested Ivan could have been involved. Work records again indicated that Ivan had the opportunity.
After Ivan’s arrest in May 1994, Phillip Polglase approached the task force and claimed that early one morning, possibly during Easter 1992, while he was staying overnight with David Milat, the second youngest of the Milat brothers, at the Milat family home at Guildford, Ivan and Richard arrived home. They were talking about picking up hitchhikers and stabbing and shooting them. Polglase said that they showed him a knife with fresh blood on it, backpacks, passports, a machete and a revolver.
Polglase suffered short-term memory loss as a result of a car accident some years earlier, and during interviews with police his version of events varied significantly. Nonetheless, his claims and the reported statements made by Richard to workmates were investigated. It soon became clear that Polglase’s work records did not support all the claims he had made. Further, much of the detail supplied by him had been previously reported in the media. During August 1994 various conversations between Polglase, Richard and David Milat were recorded. Three months later, on 27 November, Polglase was killed in a car crash. During that time, no evidence or information was gained, either electronically or physically, to support Polglase’s claims, or otherwise to suggest that either Richard or David were involved in the backpacker murders or any other criminal activity.
In later court proceedings Richard said he couldn’t remember saying ‘Stabbing a woman is like cutting a loaf of bread’; ‘There are two Germans out there, they haven’t found them yet’; ‘I know who killed the Germans’; or ‘There’s more bodies out there, they haven’t found them all.’ At the time Richard was said to have made these claims, there had been a flurry of media reports and speculation about missing backpackers, including ‘the Germans’, and if they were made it is likely that, tasteless as they were, the comments were not based on any specific knowledge of Ivan’s murders, but were perhaps simply a crass attempt by Richard to draw attention to himself, based on things he had read in the media.
Numerous people were nominated as suspects in the backpacker killings, some as lone killers and others as possible partners of Ivan. Suspicions were, generally, based on the violent background of those nominated rather than any specific knowledge of a connection with the backpacker murders. Every piece of information was assessed, after which many were dismissed.
In addition to Ivan and the Milat family, eleven others were the subject of serious investigation by Task Force Air during the six years of its existence. In four cases the suspects had been convicted and gaoled for the sexual assault and murder of hitchhikers in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Northern Territory between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, while others had sexually assaulted and murdered their victims after abducting them. Four of the eleven suspects had buried their victims in forest graves, not dissimilar to the graves of the backpackers, and three were known to have used .22 calibre rifles. Three were investigated because they were said to have either an intimate knowledge of the Belanglo State Forest or an obsession with it. No evidence was found to connect any of these suspects with the murder of any of the backpackers, or to Ivan or his family.
Eight people were charged by the task force with a total of 41 criminal offences. Ivan’s charges and convictions relating to the seven backpacker murders and one abduction have been dealt with in detail, but there were other offences. While searching Ivan’s home at Eagle Vale police found a .32 calibre Browning pistol hidden in the laundry; the pistol had been stolen during a break-in at the office of the Department of Main Roads at Kenny Hill, west of Campbelltown, in August 1977. Three of the guns found at Walter’s home at Hill Top, but known to belong to Ivan, were among property stolen from the home of Shirley’s former husband, Gerhard Soire, at Sandy Point in southern Sydney between 31 December 1992 and 4 January 1993. Ivan was charged with ‘receiving’ the pistols, knowing them to be stolen, but given he was serving several life sentences, there was felt to be little point pursuing the matter. A brief of evidence was also submitted to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions over the arson attack on Ivan’s former mother-in-law’s home at East Lambton in February 1988, but again the prosecution was dropped.
As well as the drug and firearms charges against Walter and Richard Milat, detailed in earlier chapters, Ivan’s nephew Christopher Stephan Milat was summonsed over possession of a .44 calibre Ruger Magnum revolver found at the Bargo home of his parents, William and Carolynne Milat, during the police search on 22 May 1994. He was fined $700.
During Ivan’s trial, Walter admitted disposing of a .45 calibre pistol given to him by Shirley Soire and owned by Ivan. Walter had given evidence on the basis that it would not be used against him, but as mentioned earlier Shirley was summonsed on a charge of possessing an unlicensed .45 calibre pistol. She pleaded guilty and was fined $1000.
Ivan’s nephew, Henry Shipsey, was convicted in the Dubbo Local Court of possessing cannabis and fined $1400.
Anthony Roman Kosorog of Dulwich Hill was charged with ‘public mischief’ in making an anonymous phone call to police on 3 February 1994, claiming responsibility for the backpacker murders. He was fined $300 and placed on a $1000, eighteen-month good behaviour bond.
Task Force Air was formally disbanded on 30 November 1996. Four months later, on 24 March 1997, Ivan’s daughter, Lynise, was charged by local police at Gosford Local Court with possessing a .25 calibre semi-automatic pistol and a prohibited switchblade knife, and with stealing a knife and possessing cannabis. The charges related to a break-in she had committed on her former partner’s home at Long Jetty on the New South Wales Central Coast in December 1996. Lynise pleaded guilty, and was fined $400 and placed on a $1000, three-year good behaviour bond.
15
REFORM
On 11 May 1994, eleven days before the arrest of Ivan Milat, the long-serving independent MP for the South Coast, John Hatton, stood up in the New South Wales Parliament and called for a royal commission to investigate corruption and misconduct within the New South Wales Police Service. In particular, Hatton wanted the commission to determine whether corruption and misconduct were ‘systemic and entrenched’ and, if so, to recommend ways of cleaning up the police. The Liberal–National government resisted Hatton’s demands for many months, but eventually caved in. The commission opened on 15 June 1995 and ran until March 1997.
I had been commander at the St George–Sutherland police district for a year when the Wood Royal Commission began. One month later I was assigned to a major corruption inquiry centred on Fairfield and Cabramatta. Designated Task Force Medlar, the inquiry spanned more than a decade from the early 1980s, and was widened to include much of Sydney’s west. While the royal commission never took evidence from Medlar, it was provided with periodic briefings and received copies of the task force’s final reports.
Crime in Cabramatta had been policed from Fairfield until the early 1990s, when Cabramatta was given its own detective force. Between 1984 and 1994 the area had been largely controlled by a group of detectives known as the ‘Rat Pack’, led by a junior detective who gave directions to both junior and some senior police. The Rat Pack was involved in drugs and
money rip-offs (at least $20,000 cash on one occasion), the theft of money from illegal card games ($40,000 on one occasion and $30,000 on another), the fabrication of evidence and a range of other corrupt practices. Double- and triple-crossing were routine. One informant told Medlar he had set up around 60 drug dealers for the head Rat to rip off. The Wood Royal Commission rollover witness WS14, who admitted widespread corruption, offered the following description of the way the Fairfield detective office was run: ‘If you’re supervising a crime wave, it was run pretty good.’
In mid-1996 I was appointed acting assistant commissioner in charge of the North Region police command, based at Gosford. In September, as the royal commission was winding down, Englishman Peter Ryan was appointed New South Wales police commissioner, and in February 1997 I was made head of Crime Agencies (now called State Crime Command), which was to replace the existing system of centralised crime commands and regional crime squads.
By the time it closed its doors, the commission had held 451 hearing days and heard from 902 public witnesses, at an estimated cost of $64 million. Two months later, in May 1997, the commission released its final report. Almost immediately, Ryan announced plans to sack up to 200 police who had been adversely named by the commission, the overwhelming majority of whom were detectives or former detectives.
I found myself in charge of an ‘empty agency’: there were to be no automatic transfers or appointments, and positions had to be applied for and approved through Police Internal Affairs. Crime, however, had not stopped, so my first task was to find out where all the previously centralised detectives were and what they were doing.
A handful of clearances went through quickly. Among them were Rod Lynch, who had recently been promoted to detective chief superintendent, and Detective Chief Superintendent Rod Harvey. Lynch’s job was to bring a strategic focus to major investigations and resource deployment, while Harvey would handle the day-to-day management of operations.
In our search for detectives we identified around 760 positions in the now-disbanded centralised investigative commands. In addition, we found around 250 on long-term secondment to the centralised commands, including task forces. There was no comprehensive record of these secondments, details of which had to be obtained separately from each command.
Five hundred and eighty-three positions were allocated to Crime Agencies. As a result of sackings, resignations and reassignments following the royal commission, Crime Agencies was never assigned its full complement of staff. The shortages had to be shared by all the individual agencies within the command, including the Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency. At the 1999 election, the government pledged to appoint another 150 police to Crime Agencies, but two years later not a single extra detective had been recruited, and the command was almost 300 detectives below its authorised strength for the investigation of major and organised crime.
Task Force Air offered a valuable template for the reform of criminal investigation that followed the Wood Royal Commission, especially in its improved management, information and record-keeping systems. Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Scott Whyte led the development of a new information management system, based on feedback from practitioners in the field, that came to be known as [email protected]. The system was designed to record, track, analyse and report on information gathered during any type of investigation. Built by an external contractor in the latter half of 1999, it has been continuously refined and upgraded ever since.
In 2001 [email protected] was described by Commissioner Ryan as ‘an innovative computer system that will assist the Service to conduct major investigations, improve productivity, make better use of scarce resources and establish a “best practice” model of investigation’. In 2000 the project won the ‘Implementation Australian Government’ category of the national IT industry awards—a category that recognises the best use of technology to improve operations and services to benefit government and taxpayers. Today it holds the records of sixteen years of major investigations conducted by the New South Wales Police, together with unsolved homicide reviews going back to 1970.
In the aftermath of the Wood Royal Commission, one of the first tasks of the newly formed Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency was an informal review of pre-1997 unsolved homicides. During the first twelve months, reviews of six unsolved cases resulted in the arrest of eight people for murder, and one person for conspiracy to murder. (These figures do not include eleven murder charges laid by Strike Force Yandee, working with the New South Wales Crime Commission, against four offenders for seven murders committed between 1984 and 1994.)
In 1998 the review of unsolved homicides was formalised with the appointment of a team of seven detectives headed by Detective Superintendent Ron Smith and Detective Inspector (now Deputy Commissioner) Nick Kaldas. In practice, it was rare for more than a couple of those detectives to be looking at unsolved homicides; the rest were usually ‘borrowed’ to work on current cases. Nevertheless, by 1999 the team had conducted preliminary reviews of 266 unsolved cases between 1970 and 1996. (Around 2350 murders were recorded as having been reported during the period.)
By the mid-2000s, the number of unsolved cases since 1970 had grown to around 400.
16
NEWCASTLE
In early 1998 the Newcastle Legal Centre, on behalf of the families and relatives of missing persons in the Hunter Region, wrote to the police minister, Paul Whelan, seeking a review of several unsolved disappearances over the past twenty years. As commander of the newly established Crime Agencies, I was asked to meet representatives of the legal centre to hear what they had to say. Their case was persuasive and I agreed to an investigation.
Led by Detective Inspector Wayne Gordon, Strike Force Fenwick comprised detectives from the Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency and from the Newcastle area. Based at Newcastle Police Station, it began work on 23 March with 38 investigators and analysts.
As well as being an experienced homicide and major crime investigator, Gordon was familiar with some of the cases, having played a key role in an investigation, begun a year earlier by Crime Agencies, into a number of missing persons, including those from the Newcastle area.
The legal centre had referred specifically to the disappearance of ten young people, and these ten cases, occurring between 1978 and 1993, became the focus of Strike Force Fenwick.
As with the backpacker inquiry, existing police records on the cases under investigation had to be re-entered and original documents scanned into a new information management system. Some exhibits were found to be missing, while others had been destroyed because of the age of the case.
News of the strike force aroused intense community interest, especially in the Newcastle area, and over the next few months information poured in. Reports of unpleasant odours, grave-like disturbances of the ground and suspicious activities by unidentified persons on or around the dates when people disappeared suggested the existence of as many as 200 different clandestine grave sites around the Hunter Region. One hundred and thirty locations were visited by detectives, and 51 sites were investigated by a range of specialists including forensic anthropologists, forensic pathologists, botanists, geologists, dog handlers, divers and sub-surface search experts equipped with ground-penetrating radar.
Blood samples were taken from the families of the missing persons for DNA profiling, and inquiries were made with social security, Medicare, immigration, banks, law enforcement and any other state and commonwealth agencies likely to have had dealings with the missing persons if they were still alive. Original witnesses were reinterviewed, new witnesses found, and other people of interest interviewed.
Eventually the strike force was able to draw up a list of 40 potential suspects. Some were identified from a review of police records. Many had criminal records for violent crimes such as murder and sexual assault, or had been investigated for these crimes and had links to the Hunter Region. Others were considered to have shown an ‘obsession’ with the missing persons, or to
have made comments implying an intimate knowledge of the disappearances, while others attracted attention simply because of their ‘suspicious behaviour’. Among the list of potential suspects was Ivan Milat.
Over four months from late 1978 to early 1979, Leanne Beth Goodall, Robyn Elizabeth Hickie and Amanda Therese Robinson all went missing from the Newcastle area. Ivan was a person of interest in the disappearances of all three.
By the time the strike force began its reinvestigation, there was already widespread media speculation linking Ivan Milat to the disappearances of hitchhikers in the Hunter during the 1970s and 1980s. From time to time people had reported sightings of Ivan in the area. In June 2001, after reviewing the holdings of Task Force Air, Fenwick investigators interviewed Ivan at the Supermax in Goulburn gaol. He denied any knowledge of or involvement in the disappearances of Goodall, Hickie or Robinson.
In 2002, having taken its inquiries into the three disappearances as far as it could, Fenwick presented its findings to the New South Wales state coroner, John Abernethy. Because of the similarities between the cases, Abernethy conducted a joint inquest into the disappearances. Around 160 witnesses were called.
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